Posted by J.O. Aho on 07/15/07 17:39

David Segall wrote:
> I was recently challenged by a friend because I send plain text emails
> and I replied with a reference to the usual arguments
> <http://www.georgedillon.com/web/html_email_is_evil.shtml>. At about
> the same time I received an email from another friend that was written
> using HTML on his company "letterhead". It looked great.
>
> Do you use HTML for your corporate or personal email?

I use plain text for both my private e-mails and my work e-mails and I dislike
to get the HTML junk, as it just makes the mail bigger, slower and it won't
look the same in every html-displaying-mail-client.


> Can an HTML email be
> written so that it looks OK in a client that does not accept them?

IMHO they don't look great, but you can get an acceptable result if you use
plain html 4.1 without style sheets. I hate to get those long lists of images
like banners, backgrounds and so on that are included in the mail as
attachments (if you have to use such things, use external links to images
instead of sending them with the mail).


> Apart from the "usual arguments" are there other pitfalls?

There are of course pitfalls for the person receiving the mail, as the sender
can try to play dirty tricks, it seems like OE is the client that can get the
most trouble with scripts and images that tries to use bugs to get access to
the system.

--

//Aho

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